Hope might not mean what we think it means

This sermon was preached at Christ Lutheran Church (Fredericksburg, VA) on the Sixth Sunday in Easter, May 14, 2023.You can find the text of this sermon and a video of me preaching it below.

As humans, we can hope for all kinds of things. We can hope it doesn’t rain. We can hope we get good grades. As in so many Disney movies, we might hope that one day our prince or princess might come. We may even hope just to get through another difficult day.[i] As humans, we would love to be in control of our future. And in some ways, yes, our decisions and efforts can impact our outcomes positively or negatively. Yet, there’s much more that we cannot control. People who we count on might fail us, or gremlins seem to take over the mechanisms of our day. Unexpected storms come too.

Therefore, some people go beyond the entertainment of astrology and seek to use it as a guide. There are still people today who cast spells and make incantations hoping for their desired outcome. We might also know Christians that hang onto a religious medal or a cross as if they were a lucky rabbit’s foot. We all can fall into such traps at times. Hopeful thinking can easily become wishful thinking or even magical thinking. “If I do this just right, God will surely give me that or do this” – as if we cantrol God. There’s a reason scripture argues against such things. God wants us to remember that we aren’t God. We cannot control everything no matter how hard we try. We cannot bribe God to love us more than God already does. No amount of manipulation or preparation or wishing can make us perfectly prepared for the life that lies ahead. Only God’s love has that power. So, why don’t we trust in God’s love offered to us so freely?

Isn’t it interesting that Paul writes so much about hope? He does so because Paul’s concept of hope isn’t made of powerless wishes. It is based on jesus. Paul hopes because he trusts in the Triune God: a god who created us out of love, who died for our sake, and who is with us now (loving and trying to guide us!) amidst any suffering or challenge. It is that god, our God, who will never let us go – who promises to help us get through our days. Paul knows full well that things will go wrong (not might go wrong but will go wrong at times). He has had friends die. He was almost stoned to death himself and was shipwrecked in a storm. He was imprisoned. he was abused. Paul knows life is hard and unfair, but he also knows with his head, and more importantly trusts deep in his heart, that a God who is love will never fail or abandon us; will never lie to us. God in Jesus Christ has promised to never do so with his blood; dying for our sake.

Certainly, we must remember that Paul was incredibly gifted at the art of rhetoric. As a Pharisee, he had to be, and those skills helped him as a converted Apostle. We startg today in Chapter 3 of his “Letter to the Romans.” That’s his latest and last letter that we know about, likely reflecting his most developed understanding of God’s love. It it he proclaims Good News. After unpacking our common sins…that we can make almost anything an idol and we struggle with sin in both body and mind….after warning about hypocrites (perhaps you and me at times) who call out people for sin while blind to their own…Paul proclaims Good News for all of us in our shared sinfulness: A person is justified by faith apart from any works that we can do. Whew, the pressures off! God is not expecting perfection from us, because we cannot attain it.

In Christ, God had promised grace and peace for us, not toil and burden. In return, all that Christ asks of us to be his agents of peace and reconciliation in the world (2 Corinthians 5:11-21) reflecting God’s own love for us. One scholar writes, “Romans as a whole is about Paul’s appeal to new relationships, of which human beings fail to extend to others outside of their cultural circles.”[ii] We tend to judge people. Remember, it seems that perhaps Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians in that Roman community experienced tension and mutual condemnations at times. As with so many of Paul’s letters, he is concerned with our unity in the body of Christ. As God is one, we are to try to be one. Not only that, but God will also save us in the same way. Paul writes, God “will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith” (Romans 3:30, emphasis mine). Faith is the key.

Digging deeper into his very dense writing style and theology, we see the name of our Lord Jesus Christ begin and end this important section of Chapter 5 like two bookends. Everything in our lives, he will argue, is encompassed by Christ, the Alpha and Omega. Everything is based upon “God’s faithfulness through Jesus and how our lives are different under Jesus’ lordship.”[iii] This is the point in his argument where he will pivot from the problem of sin and disunity and point us toward what God is doing now and will come next – our assurance of salvation and ongoing transformation by the Holy Spirit through our faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus death and resurrection has changed everything for us. We are not in the same situation due to Christ’s death and resurrection. There’s an access to God in a new way…our relationship has changed. He points to what God is doing now and what will happen next. We find even now that we are already loved….already victorious. He addresses the past, present, and future where our God has been and will be proven always faithful even as we struggle to be faithful ourselves.

Already, Paul has alluded to the faith of Abraham and God’s covenant with the Jewish people. God made a promise to Abraham and his descendants. God has made a similar promise through Christ. This timeless promise is being offered to all, for God’s love is an expansive, growing, encircling love…embracing love. For not only did God make a promise to Abraham, God promised in the Jewish Testament that the Jewish people would be used to bless all the world’s people so that they could be included in this promise too. As argued elsewhere, “Paul insists that God is the God of Israel specifically.” (in the Hebrew scriptures the Lord is called our God remember), yet God is “not ‘only’ the God of Israel.”[iv] Indeed, in and through Jesus Christ, “God has been faithful to both Israel and the Gentiles simultaneously.”[v]

True, a critical symbol of that faith and covenant for the Jews was circumcision. Some in that ancient time argued circumcision was helpful for hygiene but also helpful for procreation. We might debate these beliefs today with our understanding of medical science, but symbolically what we have is a covenant not just about a promised land but also about people[vi], a people God promised would be numbered more than the grains of sand on any beach or stars in the heavens. In the ancient Jewish understanding, “the particular aspect of circumcision that saves is said to be the blood that is shed.” It is a kind of ancient blood pact between God and God’s people. In fact, the ritual requires at least one drop of blood to symbolize this joining of God and God’s people. As the bleeding occurs, the circumciser quotes Ezekiel 16:6, “As you lay in your blood…live.”

No, Paul doesn’t rail against circumcision. He has just come to understand that the act isn’t saving in and of itself. He remembers Genesis 15:6 (recounting a time before Abraham was ever circumcised) where “Abraham already had faith in the Lord, who reckoned it to his merit.” (It was a justifying, saving faith.) For Paul, through Christ’s own sacrifice, he has come to understand faith in God is what saves. Through the cross, Christ’s own blood is poured, and with it, a promise of new life was declared. Something did change with Jesus’ dying and rising in a way not even Abraham dared hope for. The Holy Spirit can now reside in our hearts. That’s all true, Jesus acted to save us and fulfill the Law. Still, trust in Christ’s final sacrifice saves us, as much as Abraham’s trust in God saved him. In trusting God’s love and promises for us, we become part of God’s plan…claimed by God “for a future filled with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11)…We enter into a life where all things become possible for those who believe (Mark 9:23).

In our modern world, we tend to delude ourselves that we control our destiny. We can seek to avoid suffering, but suffering and disappointment will come for us all at times. We might even confuse God’s love as if it is the absence of suffering. (Why would we do so, when Jesus and the early Apostles who he loved suffered so much. The absence of suffering does not prove God’s love.) Yet looking back through the history of salvation, Paul recognizes something else entirely. He sees that God uses all of it – both good and bad. Through those experiences, God will make good come for the glory of God and our ultimate benefit (Romans 8:28). In his mind, Paul has come to understand that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Justified by Christ’s blood, redeemed by his own sacrifice, God will never forsake us or forget us even if our parents were ever to do so (Psalm 27:10). We are never asked to be perfect. We are only asked to trust and try…try in response to love as God has loved us (1 John 4:19) in thanksgiving.

As the weights of this world oppress us, whatever those weights might be for you, we can live in hope – not in magical thinking, not in others, not even in ourselves. Like Paul, we can hope in God’s steadfast love and promise at work even now. God’s love has been poured out to bring us peace…to live in us and flow through us out into the world. Faith…trust…in this new reality…turns the worst of our days into a new day of hope where we will live to witness that God’s love never fails (1 Corinthians 13)…where we will experience firsthand and eternally “God with Us.” Amen.

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[i] Elizabeth Shively, Lecturer in New Testament Studies, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland, UK. Working Preacher (2017). https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-11/commentary-on-romans-51-8-2.

[ii] Israel Kamudzandu, Associate Professor of New Testament Studies, Saint Paul School of Theology. Working Preacher (2020) https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-romans-51-11-6

[iii] Sarah Henrich, Professor Emerita of New Testament, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, Working Preacher (2008) https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-romans-51-11-3.

[iv] Levine, A. and Zvi Brettler, M., Editors (2017). The Jewish Annotated New Testament 2nd Edition. “God is one for all humanity (Rom. 3:30).” New York: Oxford University Press USA.

[v] Ibid., “God is one for all humanity (Rom. 3:30).”

[vi] Ibid, “Circumcision.”